Old Pound Coins

  

South African old coins catalog Republic of South Africa - Transvaal (1856-1899) South African Pond=20 shillings; Shilling=12 pence 5 shillings 1892 silver 5 SHILLINGS 1892 / coat of arms SAR ZUID AFRIKANSCHE REPUBLIEK / Paul Kruger (president) left Coin value - $350-400.

As coins come in they are poured into a large bucket on the kitchen floor (that Lila would love to get rid of). There are usually about 100 or so coins to the pound, depending on the mix. Most coins are circulated. These lots are as unsorted. As the orders come in the coins are scooped up, weighed and bagged. The Old English pound was a unit of weight, initially equated with the Ancient Roman weight called libra, which explains why the monetary sign in English is still ‘£’, the letter ‘L’ as the initial of libra. We exchange both British Pound coins and banknotes, and we also accept withdrawn Pound Sterling banknotes. Indeed, while pre-decimalisation shillings were used as 5p coins, for a while after decimalisation many people continued to call the new 5p coin a shilling, since it remained 1 ⁄ 20 of a pound, but was now counted as 5p (five new pence) instead of 12d (twelve old pennies).

The old one pound coin went out of circulation on 15 October 2017. This has all happened rather suddenly, hasn’t it? It feels like the shiny new one pound coins only came out the other week. However if you have found an old one pound coin lurking in your money box or down the back of the sofa, STOP RIGHT THERE, BUSTER. There are still a number of ways in which you can spend an old one pound coin – and they are all listed below.

Before you continue: do note that at the time of writing, certain shops and supermarkets will still accept your old one pound coin. I haven’t included this list in the bigger list below, because the amnesty for the old one pound coin is of an extremely limited duration. However here is what you need to know:

Tesco – accepting the old one pound coin until 23 October 2017.

Aldi – accepting the old one pound coin until 30 October 2017.

Iceland – accepting the old one pound coin until 31 October 2017.

Poundland – accepting the old one pound coin until 31 October 2017.

Small shops – it’s worth asking!

Here are five other ways to spend your old pound coins:

1. You can use your old pound coin in supermarket trolleys.

Certain supermarkets have not upgraded their trolleys, so the round pound coins will still work. Earlier this month, Sainsburys and Tesco both admitted they hadn’t yet modified their trolleys to take the new pound coins, blaming ‘internal logistical problems.’

2. You can donate your old pound coin to the Poppy Appeal.

The Royal British Legion is accepting old one pound coins as donations to its 2017 Poppy Appeal, which runs until 12 November 2017.

Old Pound Coins

Claire Rowcliffe, director of fundraising for the Royal British Legion, has said: “We’d be delighted to turn your out-of-date pounds into poppies, commemorating the fallen while enabling us to offer vital assistance to all members of the Armed Forces community, young and old.”

3. You can donate your old pound coin to Pudsey’s Round Pound Countdown.

Another charity that would be grateful for your old one pound coins in 2017 is Children in Need. It’s called Pudsey’s Round Pound Countdown.

You can no longer spend your old pounds, but we can still collect them and put them to work changing young lives here in the UK.

Old Pound Coins

Millions of round pound coins are still in circulation. We’re challenging the nation to hunt for them in saving jars, piggy banks, coat pockets and down the back of sofas, then put them to good use by donating to BBC Children in Need!

Old Pound Coins 2021

We’re aiming to collect as many as we can before our big Appeal Day on 17th November.

More details here.

4. You can add your old pound coin to your bank, building society or Post Office savings.

It turns out that a lot of high street banks will still accept old one pound coins as deposits into bank accounts. The amount of time for which you’ll be able to do this, however, varies from bank to bank.

According to the Royal Mint, the following banks are still accepting old one pound coins:

  • RBS
  • NatWest
  • Ulster
  • HSBC
  • Barclays
  • Lloyds
  • Santander
  • Nationwide
  • Clydesdale
  • Yorkshire Bank
  • Halifax
  • Bank of Scotland

If you are self-employed: it is worth noting that this policy applies to business accounts as well as personal accounts, but you have to separate the old pound coins from the new ones when you are making a cash deposit.

Also – and unsurprisingly – this offer tends to be open to current customers only. If you are not a customer and you walk through the door waving a bag of old one pound coins and asking to change them up, you will likely be told to get lost.

Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax, has said that in addition to accepting old one pound coins as deposits, it will also change old one pound coins for new one pound coins. Again, this offer is available to their current customers only. No deadline for the expiry of this offer has yet been set.

The list above may not be exhaustive, so if your financial institution of choice isn’t featured, it is worth checking with your bank or building society to see what the deal is. I’d also like to point out that at a lot of the banks listed there, you can open a savings account with as little as £1. So what are you waiting for?

5. You can check to see if your old pound coin is worth any (well, more) money.

If you are the owner of a rare one pound coin, you can flog it on eBay, sell it on another specialist site or sell it to a dealer – and make a tidy profit.

There is a terrific website called Change Checker, which focuses on the UK coin inventory and collectors’ market. The first thing you should do is take a look at the year engraved on your old one pound coin, and cross-reference it with this diagram:

As you can see, the rarest one pound coin we have is the 2011 Edinburgh design. This was part of the series depicting the UK’s capital cities. The 2011 Edinburgh one pound is the only one coin with a mintage of less than a million. Change Checker compares it to the 1983 Royal Arms shield one pound coin: more than 443 million of those were minted. At the time of writing, 2011 Edinburgh pounds in excellent condition are selling on eBay for up to £95 each.

The next rarest one pound coins are the 2011 Cardiff pound coin and the 2010 London pound coin (selling on eBay for up to £68).

One Pound Coin Uk

Coin Checker notes:

Another coin to look out for is The Royal Arms £1. Although this is a common design which is regularly ignored, make sure to look out for one with a 2008 date – that’s actually the fourth rarest £1 coin.

At the time of writing, 2008 Royal Arms pound coins in excellent condition are selling on eBay for up to £57 each.

If you have one of these coins and it isn’t in mint or excellent condition, it could still sell on eBay for around £5 – which, let’s face it, is still a handsome profit after eBay fees are paid.

The next rarest one pound coins are the 2014 Thistle, 2013 Daffodil, 2013 Rose and 2014 Flax. The selling values for these seem to range from £1.50 to £15, with much depending on the condition of the coin.

Finally…

If you have read all the way to the bottom and you haven’t found an old pound coin yet, your time is likely to come. Earlier this year, the government estimated there were more than 433 million old pound coins in circulation. Chances are that squirrelled away somewhere, you have one, or two, or three, or four…

I’d gently suggest that if you have found an old one pound coin, the best time to spend it, save it, donate it or cash it in is now. While deadlines have yet to be set for trolleys and bank amnesties, they aren’t going to be around forever. We don’t yet know if charities will be asking for old one pound coins in years to come. Coin values change over time – but they can go down as well as up. I don’t usually say this, but… spend spend spend!

Image credits: William Warby & TaxRebate.org.uk (CC by 2.0.); Change Checker/288 Group Ltd.

The £1 coin that could be worth over £25.00 and why you need to be checking your £1 coins before you spend them.

Jump straight to the NEW Change Checker £1 Scarcity Index

It’s not too late to find a rare £1 coin in your change before they cease to be legal tender after 15 October 2017

With just 5 weeks to go, the awareness campaign for the new £1 coin has stepped up a notch over the last few days, with the press warning that you need to spend all your old round £1 coins before they cease being legal tender on 15 October (although you will still be able to exchange them at banks).

But Change Checker is urging the British public to check their £1 coins before they spend them. That’s because as the Round £1 Coin disappears from our change forever, collectors are desperate to complete a collection of all 24 designs. And that includes some really quite rare £1 coins still in circulation.

Launch of the NEW Change Checker £1 Scarcity Index

That’s why Change Checker has launched its NEW £1 Scarcity Index to help collectors identify which coins are the rarest.

Up to now, change collectors have relied upon mintage figures for their indication as to which coins in circulation are the rarest. But the story is not that simple…

The £1 coin has been in circulation since 1983. During that time a total of 2.2 billion £1 have been struck for circulation. But they are not all still in use.

The last available figures for coins in circulation, published by The Royal Mint for 2014, suggest that 1,553,000,000 £1 coins are in circulation.

In other words, 650 million of the coins struck no longer circulate, presumably withdrawn over the years as worn or damaged.

The majority of those 650 million coins are from the early issuing years, meaning that although some of those years may have high mintages, the actual number of coins available to collect from your change is far lower. In fact our research suggests that only a little more than half of the early years’ £1 coins are still in circulation. Far fewer if you’re trying to secure one in good collectable condition.

Scarcity breeds scarcity

But even that is only part of the story. Of course, scarcity breads scarcity.

Even before the launch of the Great One Pound Coin Race, we noticed a rise in collector interest for £1 coins on the back of the introduction of the new 12-sided £1 coin. And the demand is always disproportionately high for the more difficult coins. The result is a continued ratcheting up in demand for the rarer coins.

The Change Checker £1 Scarcity Index

That’s the benefit of the new £1 Scarcity Index. Rather just relying on mintage figures, we have combined them with the two critical points above – the actual numbers of coins in circulation and real collector demand, measured by Change Checker swap data – to create a unique Scarcity Index for the £1 Coin.

Scaled from 100 to 1, the scores represent the relative scarcity of each coin, with 100 being the most scarce.

Scarcity vs Value

The Edinburgh City £1 coin is the UK’s scarcest £1 coin design

So what does a coin’s Scarcity Index Score mean for its value? Broadly speaking the higher the score, the more valuable a coin is likely to be. So to take the example of the highest scoring coin – the Edinburgh City £1 – it is already achieving prices of between £10.00 and £15.00 on eBay.

However, things can very quickly go mad. For example, since the Royal Mint confirmed the 2009 Kew Gardens 50p as the smallest coin mintage in circulation, online prices have regularly achieved £100 (200 times its face-value).

So with an estimated 600,000 – 800,000 coins still in circulation, the Edinburgh City £1 is somewhere in the region of 25% as scarce as the Kew Gardens 50p but with collectors clamouring to complete their £1 collection, it seems likely that a good quality example could soon be fetching between £25.00 and £50.00.

As for the other £1 coins, they will all be getting rarer by the day as they start to be removed from circulation once the new 12-sided £1 coin is released on 28 March. And, come 15 October, one thing is for certain, any collector looking to own a £1 coin will be paying a premium.

So don’t just spend your £1 coins. Check them. Rather than being worthless come 15 October, they may have even more value to collectors – especially if you own a particularly scarce £1 coin.


It’s not too late to join the Great One Pound Coin Race.

Almost 20,000 collectors have already joined the Great One Pound Coin Race for FREE.

Simply click here to enter today and you too could own a complete collection of £1 coins direct from your change before they’re gone for ever.